Rick Moody’s Twitter Short Story Draws Long List of Complaints

Rick Moody hasn’t even tweeted “The End” yet, and already the short story he’s posting on Twitter is drawing criticism in publishing circles.

Yesterday, Speakeasy interviewed Moody about his new short story, which he’s writing for the literary journal Electric Literature — distributing the piece in 153 tweets, over the course of three days. Moody said he was introduced to Twitter by his wife and doesn’t tweet himself but began to see the micro-blogging service’s character counter as “some strange, poetical limitation that would be fun to work with.” With prompting from Electric Literature, he began formulating a story expressly with Twitter in mind.

Titled “Some Contemporary Characters,” the story revolves around a man and a woman who meet through an on-line dating site. The criticisms of the piece are less with content than distribution. In addition to Electric Literature’s Twitter feed, several partners agreed to co-publish the story, like Vroman’s bookstore in Pasadena. As the L.A. Times’ Jacket Copy blog points out, these feeds tend to share followers, so some Twitter users have been inundated with repeat tweets of Moody’s story. One bookseller wrote “Please, please stop the madness.”

The decision of some co-publishers to publish Moody’s story while continuing their normal tweet flow also means the narrative is continually being disrupted by unrelated tweets – the Web equivalent of an audience standing up during a speech and carrying on cross-conversations while the speaker continues to talk. Michael Cader wrote a piece for Publishers Marketplace outlining these issues with the subtitle “Moody’s Twitter Story Backfires.” He said the criticism “underscores how extremely sensitive audiences are — especially on social networking sites, where communication feels very personal and is always immediate.”

Andy Hunter, the editor and co-publisher of Electric Literature, said his journal decided to partner with other Twitter users in order to broaden the audience for Moody’s story. The simultaneous broadcast approach was used because re-tweeting the story would have added “@electricliterature” to the end of each of Moody’s lines, he said. Hunter also pointed out that few people outside of book industry insiders or publishing media would subscribe to the Twitter feeds of several of the co-publishers, so the aggravated are a vocal but small minority.

“I do have misgivings that we annoyed a few book bloggers,” Hunter said, “but at the same time, we were able to get 10,000 more readers for Rick’s story. In that way, I think it’s been very successful.”

For his part, Moody said he feels readers’ pain “on the multiple feeds front,” adding “I guess we are victims of marketing success here.” As for the hasty debate over the triumph, or lack thereof, of his foray into Twitter publishing, Moody said, “I am pleased with the instantaneity of the responses, but like many responses that come to pass in the digital world, they seem to have the not-fully-cooked quality that you get with immediacy.”